Louis Till

Louis Till
File:Louis Till.jpg
Born	February 7, 1922 Cape Girardeau, Missouri, U.S.
Died	Pisa, Tuscania, Italy
Cause of death	Execution by hanging
Criminal status	Executed
Spouse(s)	Mamie Carthan (m. 1940)
Children	Emmett Till
Conviction(s)	Premeditated murder Rape

Louis Till (7 February 1922 – 2 July 1945) was an American soldier. He was the father of Emmett Till, whose murder in August 1955 at the age of 14 galvanized the civil rights movement. Till was court-martialed on two counts of rape and one count of murder in Italy in 1945 while serving in the U.S. Army and was executed by hanging. The circumstances of his death were unknown to his family until they were revealed after the trial of his son's murderers ten years later.

Life

Louis Till grew up an orphan in New Madrid, Missouri. As a young man he worked at the Argo Corn Company and was an amateur boxer. At the age of 17, Till began courting Mamie Carthan, a girl of the same age. Her parents disapproved, thinking the charismatic Till was "too sophisticated" for their daughter. At her mother's insistence Mamie broke off their courtship but the persistent Till won out, and they married on October 14, 1940. Both were 18 years old. Their first and only child, Emmett Louis Till, was born on July 25, 1941. Mamie left her husband soon after learning that he had been unfaithful. Louis, enraged, choked her to unconsciousness, to which she responded by throwing scalding water at him. Eventually Mamie obtained a restraining order against him. After he repeatedly violated this order, a judge forced Till to choose between enlistment in the Army and imprisonment. Choosing the former, he enlisted in 1943.

Crime and death

While serving in the Italian Campaign, Till was arrested by military police, who suspected him and another soldier, Fred A. McMurray, of the murder of an Italian woman and the rape of two others, in Civitavecchia. A third soldier was granted immunity in exchange for testimony against McMurray and Till. After a short investigation, he and McMurray were court-martialed, found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out at the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa on July 2, 1945. Both soldiers had pleaded innocent; their defense team offered no evidence in support of their innocence, and Till stayed silent during the trial. Before the execution, Till was imprisoned alongside American poet Ezra Pound, who had been imprisoned for collaborating with the Nazis and Italian Fascists; he is mentioned in lines 171–173 of Canto 74 of Pound's Pisan Cantos:

"Till was hung yesterday

for murder and rape with trimmings"

Till was buried in the Naples Allied Cemetery. In 1948, his remains were moved to the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery.

Aftermath

File:Conf56-03 march-56.jpg

Confidential magazine headlines a story on Louis Till's execution in 1956

The circumstances of Till's death were not revealed to his family; Mamie Till was only told that her husband's death was due to "willful misconduct". Her attempts to learn more were comprehensively blocked by the United States Army bureaucracy. The full details of Louis Till's crimes and execution only emerged ten years later. On August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi, after allegedly making advances towards Carolyn Bryant, a local white woman. (Years later, a historian stated that Bryant disclosed to him that she had fabricated testimony that Till made verbal or physical advances towards her in the store. However, the family of Bryant has disputed this claim.) Her husband and brother-in-law abducted Till and tortured him to death, then threw his body into the river. Both were arrested a few days later, charged with and tried for first-degree murder, but were acquitted by an all-white jury in September 1955.

In October 1955, after the murder trial and acquittal gained international media attention, Mississippi senators James Eastland and John C. Stennis uncovered details about Louis Till's crimes and execution and released them to reporters. In November 1955, a grand jury declined to indict the two abductors for kidnapping Till, despite the fact that they had given a magazine interview in which they admitted to having kidnapped Till.

The Southern media extensively covered the story: various editorials claimed that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the "Yankee" media had covered up, or lied about, the record of Emmett Till's father. Many of these editorials specifically cited an article in Life magazine, which presented Louis Till as having died fighting for his country in France. According to historians, Life magazine was an exception rather than the rule, and no other "northern" media had lionized Pvt. Till or embellished his record; additionally, Life later published a retraction. However, the impression was left among some southerners that the erroneous Life article was representative of the Northern media in general. Several other Southern editorials went so far as to associate Emmett Till with his father's crimes. They implied that Emmett may have attempted rape after the fashion of his father, thereby justifying his murder.

Challenge of trial's authenticity

In 2016, notable African-American novelist and essayist John Edgar Wideman explored the circumstances leading up to and including the military conviction of Louis Till. In the partly fictional book, Writing to Save a Life – The Louis Till File. Wideman examined the trial record and compared it to the trial of Emmett's killers, calling both of them "A farce", and believes that Mr. Till's military records being leaked during 1955 was an intentional effort to manipulate the outcome of the latter trial. Wideman expresses the viewpoint that Louis Till may have been punished for the "Crime of being (Black)", rather than for committing any real crimes, citing the disproportionate punishment of African-American soldiers for rape as well as laws in the United States that defined all sexual encounters between African-American men and white women as rape.

Wideman claims that in Till's murder trial, one of its witness insisted that the killer was a white person before recanting their statement, and in Till's rape trial, both victims said that they were assaulted in darkness and could not identify their attackers, declining to label Till or his co-defendant as suspects. Wideman claims that their execution, due to this, may have been racially motivated.

See also

• Capital punishment by the United States military
• Capital punishment in the United States
• List of people executed by the United States military